Friday, October 19, 2007

New project with new chip (nRF24LU1)

I have decided to use one of the suggestions from the previous post for the next project. In case you didn't know, Nordic recently released a new chip that takes the 24L01 and on the same chip adds an 8051 core, 16 kB of EEPROM for program memory, and an AES encryption coprocessor. It also has 6 GPIO pins, that can also be multiplexed with other features, such as hardware SPI and UART.

I am going to try to lay out a board and get SDCC or some other compiler to generate code for the 8051 core. If any of you guys are familiar with 8051 coding (especially in C using some freely available compiler), then I would definitely like to hear from you (the easiest way is to make comments on this post).

This project is going to be quite an undertaking, and once I get my stuff working I will try to start making some boards for purchase. There will also have to be some sort of programmer module, since programming the chip initially requires that it be done over SPI. If I can get a bootloader going, I am going to try to get USB up and running on the chip, so that it can be programmed that way.

It may be a while before I get this done (or even a large amount of progress). Be patient and watch for updates occasionally.

Edit: I now have nRF24LU1 breakout boards for sale at http://store.diyembedded.com!

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